The Fish Ladder (13 page)

The Irish
Metrical Dindshenchas
are packed with stories about our relationship to the land. They tell how certain features of the landscape were called, or forced, into being and describe how they came to be named.

There was once a High King, a god, called the Dagda. Strong and tall, he was a warrior, and a hunter, a skilled musician, a storyteller, a lover.

A lover.

In
The Well at the World’s End
Neil Gunn tells of a goddess who went to seek a well in the land beyond our own. It is called the Well of Elcmar, after its guardian, a water god. Boand, the goddess, was Elcmar’s wife. Everyone was forbidden from approaching the well except those who were charged with its care. It was said to be impossible even to move before the water without incurring injury, and that the eyes of anyone attempting to look into it would burst. So what was Boand,
fair and white-limbed –
according to the
Metrical Dindshenchas
–
soft-blooming, and with perfect eyes
, doing there?

Hither came on a day white Boand

(her noble pride uplifted her),

to the well, without being thirsty

to make trial of its power.

Another version of Boand’s story says she approached the well in the hope of finding knowledge, so she could learn how to conceal her infidelity. For that most capable god the Dagda was her lover, and she wanted to know how to hide this, as well as the child she had borne him, from her husband.

The Dagda did everything he could. When he and Boand began to make love, before dawn, on that first lovely day, he held the sun in the sky for nine whole months, so that in the space of their coupling their child was conceived, grew full-term inside her, and was born before sunset. And while this great feat of lovemaking continued, throughout the whole of this very long day, Elcmar was diverted by the most ludicrous of errands. Aengus, the love child, was magnificent – of course – and grew up to become the god of love himself. The affair was not so easy to conceal.

Or perhaps Boand was just curious. It was, after all, the fountain of knowledge. Yet even as she walked about the well,
heedlessly
, according to the legend,
three waves roared out of it
, one for each circuit that she made. One can more or less put money that she walked anticlockwise, or wicken way. The first wave
broke off her foot
, the second
took out her eye
, and the third
shattered her hand
. Boand rushed to the sea, in order to escape further blemish, and so that none might see her mutilation. But the waves followed her and drowned her. The water kept flowing from the well. And this water, this river, was named after her, and we now know it as the Boyne. Yet, while the River Boyne preserves Boand’s name, fourteen other rivers – including the Euphrates, the Tiber, the Jordan and the Severn – were all said to have come into being when Boand upset the well. Even the River Tigris, which flows through paradise itself.

Every way the woman went

The cold white water followed

From the Sid to the sea (not weak it was),

So that thence it is called Boand.

Boand from the bosom of our mighty river-bank,

Was the mother of great and goodly Aengus,

The son she bore to the Dagda – bright honour!

In spite of the man of this Sid.

With thoughts of the Dagda and poor drowned Boand nudging at one another inside me, I got back into the car.

I continued on my way, the Angel receding in the mirror. I found him wonderful and saw in him a good omen, if any omen were needed. I felt as though I’d passed through a gateway, and that my journey had begun for real. I found myself thinking about
Another Place
. The Angel was made of iron, as were the Antonys at Liverpool. In the old tales iron is said to be abhorrent to the fairies, the people
of this Sid, aes sidhe
, meaning the hill dwellers. According to the fairy tales this is because the nails of the cross were made of iron. A more prosaic reason might be because the Celtic people brought it with them, or rather, brought the skill to work it. It represented, in the plough, and the sword, and the horseshoe, the displacement of a different way of life.

The Celts believed that the Otherworld was parallel to our own, and that you could step into it, or through it, at certain times. Only particular things, like a tree half covered in leaves, or a field full of black-and-white sheep, indicated that you were there at all. You had to look out for the signs. You had to know them.

The lay-by had been on a slip road, and I discovered that I couldn’t get back to the A1. Somehow I had made an error, and was running parallel to my route. While I was wondering how to rectify this I saw a sign for Fountains Abbey. Many years ago I had worked on a film in which the abbey had been used as a location. I had been in the cutting room, in London, and was enthralled by the film rushes as they came in from the lab. I had held the 16mm film up to the window, saw the replicated images of green grass, a golden river, the lacy ruin of the church itself, each cube of sunlight separated by a frame bar, like dozens of emerald cut stones. So I followed the sign, and drove towards Ripon, presuming the abbey to be near by. But it wasn’t. After half an hour travelling through undulating fields, I still didn’t seem to be moving. The thickly clouded sky was silver, with the very high contrast of a black-and-white print. Hand-tinted. Bruised. The mustard stubble of the fields looked brittle. The road, which was featureless, seemed to absorb, rather than reflect, the sky, its surface flat, and suit-grey. I couldn’t see anything ahead except an isolated copse and cylin­drical wheels of baled hay where the wheat had been recently harvested. I began to consider turning back, but the road wasn’t wide enough.

Just as I was feeling that I must have taken a second wrong turn, I entered the town of Ripon. After meandering for a few more miles, a sign for the abbey appeared. A perimeter wall bound an estate, and there were signs for Studley Royal Water Gardens. The abbey and the gardens seemed inseparable. I followed signs to a National Trust car park and entered, without paying. Doing my best to remember where I’d parked, I followed more signs to the abbey. I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was now early afternoon. I had an apple in my bag, and some chocolate, but I didn’t want to stop and get them out. I ached from driving and needed to keep moving to ease the stiffness in my spine and hips. I was aware that I was on my way to visit Liz, and that I had told her I would be with her mid-afternoon. I missed Evie. We were probably together for three-hundred and fifty-five days of the year, and this unexpected week was feeling like an eternity. I was halfway through the third day.

The night before we had left the cottage Evie had been reading in her bed in the crog-loft. She crept down the ladder. Her eyes had a storm-washed look. Something tragic had happened.

‘
Pony Club
?’ I asked – her book: one of the ponies had been ill – and she nodded. I put down what I was reading. She climbed into the bed. I turned off the light, and opened my hand on the pillow. Evie eased her face into it. We lay there, her face resting in my hand, my palm slowly filling with hot tears, until her breathing changed, and she fell asleep.

Something seemed to pass through the room. There was a tightening among the shadows, a splintered movement in the fire. I must live a long, long time, and stay well, remain strong, until this passionate creature can find her feet. Perhaps some of Rupert’s unyielding hardness – his brilliance, his discipline, his ability to focus on his work – might balance the tidal nature I had given her.

Lighthouse. Storm. Love.

I found the entrance. It was inside an eco-spacecraft welcome centre full of pencils with rubbers on the end, postcards, fudge, and CDs of wild birdsong. There was a fast track painted onto the floor – like an IKEA showroom – for Trust members. I followed the arrows, but the guardian of the gate, a sour-looking lady in a Barbour coat and Wellingtons, stopped me. She embodied what Wilkie Collins called ‘that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants’.

‘This is for members,’ she said.

‘Yes. Of course.’ I showed her my green card. She peered at it. Hard.

Unable to find anything wrong with the card, the woman handed it back, then sucked in her cheeks and flicked her eyes towards the gate. I felt that she was disappointed not to be able to send me to the end of the extensive queue meandering towards the ticket desk.

I spent most of my year in Barcelona, where I communicated in the most basic Spanish. The rest of the time I lived in the Llŷn Peninsula where Welsh was spoken by seventy-five per cent of the community, but I was, so far, unable to follow it. I was protected from day-to-day grumpiness because all nuances passed me by. It was like living in a religious order that had taken a vow of silence. I was cushioned. If I did wish to communicate with any level of sophistication, it tended to be with friends or family. All other human interactions were pared to a minimum; Ockham’s Razor had become a way of life. The downside of this was that when I found myself surrounded by my increasingly abrasive countrymen, and understanding every word of it, I felt as though I was missing a layer of skin.

‘Thank you,’ I said, smiling, and pocketed the card.

I set out across open ground, still following the IKEA-style footpath, and feeling oddly coerced, as though my freedom had been curtailed. There were more notices, they were everywhere, making suggestions regarding route or destination:
The Banquet House is now open
, and an arrow. My phone rang. Liz was in Newcastle – where was I? She was going to be another couple of hours. Time was suddenly on my side and I no longer felt obliged to hurry. But a sense of anxiety had accompanied me since I left the car. It had begun to emerge as I crossed the yellow fields, growing out of the feeling that I was lost. And now I felt put out by my interaction with the gate-keeper, who was the first person I had spoken to on this journey. It had been an interchange bereft of human kindness, and quite without welcome. It was the third time I had been alone, entirely alone, since my miscarriage. The trips to Spurn Point and to Pamela’s funeral had been the others. I felt empty, my arms long and elastic. I had no one to look after, nothing to hold.

I followed the footpath downwards through a wood. Tall trees closed over me, wrapping me in green light. The air was cool. There was a quality of stillness about the place. A wood is usually crisp with sound, a place of constant movement: the gentle oscillation of the trees, the card-pack shuffle of leaves, the dry voices of twigs as they mutter and grate. There should have been a lifting cry of birds, the klaxon
haw!
of rooks, the snap and skitter of squirrels through the canopy – something to indicate the presence of the countless creatures that I knew were there. Yet there was nothing. I felt as though I were in an empty hall. The leaves rested against one another like papers on a desk. They could have been that way for years.

The footpath persisted, directing my steps. It descended to a valley and opened onto a vast manicured lawn. The River Skell curled through the lawn and past a water mill. The silence gave way to a murmur of voices, the vibrant hum of a souk. Before me was the shell of Fountains Abbey, out of all proportion to the trees among which it stood. It was like an emaciated creature trying to stand, but without enough muscle left on its bones to enable it to complete the action. The empty window at the end of the nave yawned out of the valley floor. Broken walls were capped in sky. It was something from another age – another perception – but it could as easily have been from the future as the past. I tried to imagine the abbey rising from the forest floor. The original church would have been made of timber – hand-hewn blocks of stone fitted around it, facilitated by a wooden scaffold. I wondered who had dreamed the building. How many generations of how many families had made this church their whole life’s work?

A few years ago, while driving from Las Vegas to Denver, Rupert, Evie and I had stumbled across a ghost town, called Bannack, in Montana. It had been founded in 1862. The school desks with their cast-iron fittings remained in the abandoned classroom, a blackboard was still affixed to the wall. A fragile roundabout, made of wood and metal, tilted in the playground, and we played on it. There was a grand hotel in the French style, with wood-burning stoves and a bread oven. There was a Wild West saloon bar with louvred swing-doors. Yet grass poked through the gaps in the boardwalk and filled the main street to knee height. The only sound was the ruffle of wind as it tested the blades and tousled the seed heads. The jail was a rough log cabin. The only people ever to have been executed were the Sheriff – a notorious outlaw who hoodwinked the people into electing him – and his deputies. They were hanged without trial from a gallows pole built especially for the purpose. We found this pole, lying in pieces, partially hidden amid the long grass. At first I mistook it for a telegraph pole. In its first five months Bannack was said to have produced $500,000 of gold that was ninety-five per cent pure – the equivalent of over $10,000,000 today – with a population that grew from four hundred to three thousand in the same span. But when the gold ran out the town was abandoned, almost overnight, the whorehouse and saloon silent.